1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of surveillance systems, and in particular to a system and method for optimizing the performance of a surveillance system based on a user's characterization of the environment in which the surveillance system is deployed.
2. Description of Related Art
Surveillance systems are commonly used to automatically detect particular incidents of interest, such as the appearance of an intruder, an abandoned package, a particular face, and so on. Other applications include traffic monitoring, people counting, target tracking, and the like.
Different surveillance systems exhibit different performance efficiencies for different tasks and/or in different environments. Certain systems may exhibit better performance in daylight, while others may exhibit better performance in artificial light; certain systems may exhibit better performance counting people at a distance, while others may exhibit better performance with close-up images; and so on. Different algorithms or video processing functions exhibit different sensitivities to environmental factors, and different environmental conditions introduce different requirements and constraints on the processing functions and algorithms.
To choose an appropriate system, a user might evaluate each of a variety of systems, and select the system that performed most effectively for the user's desired objectives in the user's environment. This is usually impractical, because of the cost and effort required to install a surveillance system at a user's environment, and because of the time and effort required to simulate the scenarios for which the system is intended. Alternatively, vendors of surveillance systems promote their products, promising effective performance and continued support, and the user selects the vendor and system that appears most promising. When the vendor's system is installed, the vendor attempts to optimize the performance of the system, by adjusting the various parameters that affect the operation of the various functional units in the system to best achieve the user's objectives within the user's environment. That is, to achieve optimal performance, each installed system must typically be custom-designed for the user's objectives and environment.
The custom-design approach, however, generally consumes the time and effort of skilled personnel, and research efforts continue to address techniques to automate the optimization task, and/or to develop systems that are less dependent upon the particular surveillance application and/or the particular user environment.